Open Data in Italy has a lot to tell about some stories characterised by a really interesting bottom-up approach.I like the idea that we should innovate without permission, as David Osimo said some time ago and many other experts agreed. “ We can make an augmented government with the right tools“.

Here are some notes on what’s happening in Italy around these topics.

Working Groups to help municipalities going through Open Data

There is a news on epsiplatform about Alessandria and its initiative related to a multi-stakeholders approach to Open Data. Alessandria is a municipality which has a default: it’s interesting how trasparency and re-use of data will help a better governance.

This isn’t a novelty: Florence had opened Open Data supported by Wikitalia, standing on the shoulders of its communities. We, as a community, can be a sort of “push” actors, and supporters against those who don’t understand the value of these actions inside the government and the administration.

There is also the case of Palermo, who has been publishing Open Data since the 23rd of February (which was the International Open Data Day). Palermo is working to make Open Data an ongoing process, and not only an event fixed during the time. A process which will involve all interested stakeholders who live in the city.

Hacking is the Italian way to help extend “data reuse” to society, but starting from the field of journalism. To this effect, the Italian community passionate about Open Data and Data Journalism organized a hackathon called “When data tells stories” during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia.

This hackathon had two main actors: the Spaghetti Open Data community and Dataninja.it: Spaghetti Open Data is the biggest italian community interested in Open Data and PSI in general, and Dataninjia is an information hub about Data Journalism, made by a team of journalists and developers.

It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.